People slashed in specific patterns
Greetings,
Full marks everyone, January is in the rearview mirror. Nothing but blue skies from now on.
But before we move on, go back and read Anne's advent stories. Magnificent
On the shortest day, they walk in the park. The London Planes are bare; it’s dark by four. But think of Spring, they say.
Joanne McNeil's Wrong Way is, of course, brilliant. I was struck by her description of the embedded, networked communities that surround the arts. And other worlds presumably. Teresa is baffled by the way her boss, Jord, is connected to his old schools.
It is something that confuses her to this day, how often Jord saw his classmates and not just from college. Teresa had gone to one of the largest high schools in the country, with over a thousand students in her graduating class. She never runs into former classmates in Boston, let alone New York, but Jord talked to people he knew from school and friends of the family throughout the week—classmates from as far back as kindergarten too. They grew up to be art collectors who worked on Wall Street, reporters for the Times who reviewed exhibitions, publishers, curators at other museums, theater directors, venture capitalists, award-wining composers, State Department undersecretaries in town for the weekend. She couldn’t imagine life this densely networked, maintaining contact with others for such durations, but they were each useful to him, certainly. If Teresa had stayed in Stoughton, regardless of her brief diversion at Amesfield State just a few miles south, her life would have been provincial—tied to her past, dead-ended at the root, and defined by her context, finalizing as the dreaded Massachusetts archetype: a townie. But look at Jord, his success sprang from the flip side of what she tried to avoid: seeing old classmates from college and from high school (boarding school) every day, asking them how their mothers are doing.
I love a story about incentives and how they're perverted. Adrianna Tan:
In the 1980s, the firm that had the contract for upholstery of BART seats paid people to slash the seats. People slashed in specific patterns so the company would know who to pay.
...a random 2-yr-old radio programme about William "Shooby" Taylor, a one-of-a-kind scat singer. It is gorgeous and my heart stopped for a moment when someone said sthg along the lines of, "He had a stutter and couldn't always say what he wanted to say, so he found a more interesting way"* bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000blwy (not sure if that link works outside the UK)
Whenever I despair of the UK I think of this:
Over the course of the last couple of years I've lived almost a full year in the UK, and there are four things I will spend the rest of my life loving:
1) Melton Mowbray mini pork pies from the Co-op or Sainsburys
2) Coronation chicken salad (superior to all other forms of chicken salad and which I now make here with regular raisins instead of sultanas - wot m8)
3) Yorkshire Gold tea (Earl Grey was wonderful but now I have discovered REAL tea)
4) The expression "can't be fucked" e.g. "I'd argue on teh birbsite more about how it's gone downhill but I can't be fucked".PROMOTIONAL NEWS
Don't forget about Interesting. Some of you haven't bought tickets yet. WTF? Wednesday 15th of May. Tickets.
And I made a new thing you can buy. How to do presentations. (If you filled in the 'get a free physical thing' form you'll be getting one in the post.)
OK. That's it. Bye bye.
Let's roll. And let's be careful out there.
(There are 969 of you. The ZAZ-969 is a Soviet four-wheel drive automobile built by the Zaporizhia Automobile Building Plant. It was the first Soviet vehicle with front wheel drive. It's very cute. "Exports were limited, though it proved popular in Italy.")